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wealth elsewhere, since his land
[terres]
will tie him down to the province
where he acquired it: he will cherish his mother, that is to say his
patrie,
whose interests will be indistinguishable from his own."
Gregoire, not unlike Edmund Burke, recognized that citizenship was
more complex than rational principles, social contracts, and individual
rights; the Enlightenment logic behind the Declaration of Rights of Man
and Citizen would not be enough to turn Jews into Frenchmen. Thus, at
the forefront of progressive revolutionary thought, the message was clear:
the Jew must become attached to the French soil. "It is probable," wrote
Gregoire, "that within a short time, the Jews will devote themselves to
agriculture." This was Gregoire's final wish: the Jew becomes not only a
patriot but a peasant.
Other eighteenth-century texts favoring Jewish emancipation also
stressed the desirability and possibility of vital bonds between the Jews and
the earth. Lakind Hourwitz, in 1788, writing in response to the question
"Are there ways to make Jews happier and more useful in France?",
replied that the Jews could indeed bond with the French earth, offering as
proof several treatises on agriculture from the Talmud, including the sec–
tion entitled
Kilayim
which dealt principally with plants that could be
sown and cultivated together. Similarly, the
Cahier de Doleances
composed
by the Jews of Alsace asked King Louis XVI for permission to own and
cultivate land. The Prince de Broglie, giving his official opinion in 1789
on the "Admission ofJews to the Civil State," argued that rules prohibit–
ing Jewish ownership ofland should be abolished so that Jews might turn
to agriculture.
But the notion ofJewish participation in agriculture remained an elu–
sive dream. During the next century, French anti-Semitic mythology
portrayed the Jew as the quintessential capitalist and speculator, the
harbinger of the dreaded modern, urban world. Jules Michelet, the great
nineteenth-century French historian and myth-maker, concisely expressed
the key elements in this vision:
The Jews, whatever be said of them, have a country - the London
Stock Exchange; they operate everywhere, but they are rooted in the
country of gold. Now that the funds of every state are in their hands,
what can they love? The land of the status quo - England. What can
they hate? The land of progress - France.
Historians of the day agreed that Jewish wealth and financial specula–
tion corresponded
to
the Jewish condition of statelessness. Michelet
pointed out that "the Jew has always put his faith in profit, in money.
During great upheavals, he told himself that wealth was his only security.
